To Eastcheap Records in the city of London on Oct. 14 for a gathering of former students of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, to celebrate the Newark campus’ collection of jazz records, artifacts and paraphernalia, widely considered to be the world’s finest and most comprehensive.
Rutgers is the august institution that valiantly attempted to provide me with an education.
Our hosts at the bar and music venue, on the walls and shelves of which are pasted and displayed LP covers, concert posters and music advertisements, were Elizabeth Surles, archivist, Institute of Jazz Studies, and a librarian at Rutgers’ Dana Research Center and Library, Rutgers University-Newark, and Wayne Winborne, executive director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at the same locale, who is a musician, documentarian and music producer.
They conducted a fascinating talk on the collection, some of the artifacts having been brought over to London — a plane trip for the priceless pieces that Surles said caused her some trepidation.
On display were Ben Webster’s saxophone, which he decreed must never be played by anyone ever again, and a handwritten questionnaire penned by a then largely unknown but burgeoning saxophonist named John Coltrane.
Webster moved from the U.S. to Denmark where he believed he would have more opportunities. That was fascinating, as during my time at Rutgers-Newark I took a course on African-American literature, and one of the Harlem Renaissance writers I studied was Nella Larsen, who wrote among other work a novel called “Passing.” It is a story of the lives of two African-American friends living in the U.S. who are able to “pass” as “Caucasian,” for want of better terminology. Webster’s jazz archive in housed in a university in Denmark.
Larsen lived in Denmark several times during her life. She died in March 1964, the same year Webster moved to Copenhagen.
I love these types of connections, even if they might be deemed to be loose ones other than to the person who initially conjured them up.
Rutgers owns a hotel — yes, here I am loosely connecting this blog to the hotel industry — the 36-room Rutgers University Inn & Conference Center in New Brunswick, the university’s principal campus.
That does not sound like a great many rooms for a university that has close to 50,000 students across its four campuses.
In attendance at the Eastcheap Records’ event were some “friends of Rutgers,” which included very fine people from the U.K. Jazz Centre in Southend on Sea, Essex (where one side of my family hails from), an organization that endeavors to raise funds to preserve the legacy of British jazz, and Glassboxx, an eCommerce firm that allows publishers to sell print and digital titles directly to readers and has as one of its principal niches collaborations with U.S. university presses.
It is all hospitality, right? And it was a very worthwhile use of a Tuesday evening to listen to jazz and chat with such people, although I was surprised Rutgers invited me back.
The other time I went to one of its London alumni events, in the banqueting and event space at the top of Tower Bridge, I think I was the only one who did not know the university song, “On the Banks of the Old Raritan,” or indeed knew that it even had one.
I need more education, evidently.
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